Breaking News - Qlusters Announces Power Management Plug-Ins for openQRM
Qlusters, a provider of data center provisioning and management software, today announced plug-in support for Dell DRAC and HP iLO remote power management cards. These power management technologies make it easy for openQRM users to manage power consumption in the data center by automatically deactivating servers when they are under-utilized or not in use, according to the company. "In the data center, the environmental aspects are a very high concern," William Hurley, CTO, Qlusters, told 5 Minute Briefing. "People are trying to really trim down the operation of the data center and be a lot more aware of all the various factors that contribute to their costs."
The plug-ins enable the openQRM platform to manage high availability servers, reducing the number of solutions needed to manage a data center, according to Qlusters. By dynamically managing servers and powering them off when they are not needed, openQRM helps users reduce the power consumed by superfluous servers and consequently reduces the cost of operation and management of them.
"In the architecture of openQRM we have the concept of a high availability pool," said Hurley, explaining, that is where servers reside when they are not in use or when they are first booted into the management system. With the new plug-ins, "we have given data center managers the ability to take servers that are not in service or are under-utilized and park them in the high availability pool, but now power them off." The ability to power them off until they are actually needed can result in considerable savings, he added.
Qlusters' openQRM is an open source data center provisioning and management solution. For more information on openQRM, go here.
For more on Qlusters, go here.
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Aperture Upgrades Data Center Management Software
Aperture Technologies, provider of data center management software, has announced the launch of VISTA 500, a major new release of its data center infrastructure resource management system.
"VISTA 500 is a release that better models today's data centers and the challenges that companies are facing," Steve Hewitt, vice president of professional services at Aperture, told 5 Minute Briefing during a private interview. "This is about managing the future."
VISTA 500 provides visual management of equipment, space, power, cooling, and overall data center capacity. Furthermore, it provides users a complete view of power consumption, allowing for the management of three-phase power, power connectivity, and the full power distribution network.
The new release offers users the ability to handle emerging technologies by managing the provisioning of blade services, which is integrated with change management processes, providing management and control over the provisioning of blade chassis.
"This is something everyone has to deal with," Sean Nicholson, senior director of product management at Aperture, explained. "We built it right into our workflow processes in VISTA 500. This allows our customers to track connectivity on various levels of granularity."
New reporting and analysis capabilities, standardized on Crystal Reports, have been added in VISTA 500, as well as advanced ad-hoc and process reporting. "The set of reports is essentially the same, but we now have full drill-down capabilities," Nicholson added.
Provisioning service-level agreements was another focus in VISTA 500. "You can monitor the speed at which different steps are occurring and ensure that the service-level agreements are being met," Hewitt noted, "With automated alerts and root-cause process analysis."
In VISTA 500, equipment IMD (install, move decommission) processes have been fully Web-enabled with intuitive tools for device positioning. Organizations can also standardize equipment provisioning requests. "This makes management easier," Nicholas said. "Overall, the goal here is a more efficient data center."
The key, he continued, is "managing the data center through process. We have a workflow engine built into the product. Being able to do integrated change and configuration management is essential today. Even more so is depth of understanding. The simple model of the data center is no longer good enough."
For more information about VISTA 500 and Aperture, go here.
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William Data Systems Upgrades Mainframe Performance Tool
To enable IBM mainframe users to have greater visibility into the performance details of their machines, William Data Systems (WDS), a specialist in mainframe software development, has released IMPLEX v.4, a new version of its real-time Internet protocol (IP) network monitor for IBM's z/OS operating system.
"It is a major release," Simon Cooper, business development manager at WDS, told 5 Minute Briefing. "The evolution of version 4 is another example of our quest to enable customers to get as quick a return as possible on the investment they have made in the product. We do everything we can to make the product simple and fast to install so they can get the information they need as quickly as they can without any long-winded setup," said Cooper. "If you do a lot of setup, it costs you time, and that's money."
The IMPLEX "Direct Stack Interface" sees all IP traffic including TCP, UDP, ICMP, OSPF, EE, OE, and X.25 (XOT). It also minimizes resource consumption since it neither traces IP data nor relies on NetStat output or SMF exits.
Enhancements to the product fall into three categories. They include enhanced network monitoring, enhancements to the existing product displays to make it easier for customers to use the software, and enhanced control of the product, said Cooper.
Included in the enhanced network monitoring features, a new capability called Threshold Discovery has been added. "It will learn the high and low watermarks of your network performance and what that means is it takes all of the guesswork out of setting up thresholds for alerts." Under the category of improved displays, a new display called Application View "provides connection and activity statistics for each of your VTAM and TCP socket applications," said Cooper. This allows users to be able "to group these things by application rather than by individual user connection." And, among enhanced control features, there is more granular response time monitoring, allowing response time ranges to be defined down to decimal places, whereas before they would be rounded to seconds. "With people's SLA agreements being what they are nowadays, they really need to tie it right down to sub-second responses and we can do that now with our response time monitoring," said Cooper.
The first release of the product since v.3.3 was introduced in May 2005, Cooper said the new product version contains over 20 enhancements in total. More information is available here.
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IBM Announces Milestones for Open Source Application Server
IBM announced that more than 600 independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators have joined IBM's WebSphere Application Server (WAS) Community Edition partner initiative, launched just six months ago. WAS Community Edition is IBM's open source application server based on Apache Geronimo.
As a direct result of this initiative, more than 200 ISVs have developed and introduced new software applications that support WAS Community Edition, while more than 250,000 copies of WAS Community Edition have been downloaded. "When IBM puts effort into something, we typically move really fast, but these numbers are pretty significant, even for IBM, in terms of how quickly this has caught on with the business partner community," Rado Nikolov, IBM open source program director, told 5 Minute Briefing.
Nikolov said two types of business partners are taking advantage of the WAS Community Edition initiative. "There are those that start with offerings for less than 10 users, then when the customer gets comfortable with it, they move to 1,000 users. As their customers' installations grow, they can eventually move to full-blown WebSphere."
In the other category of partners "are companies that offer turnkey solutions," Nikolov added. "What they find attractive in WAS CE is the fact that it has a very small footprint."
The WAS Community Edition partner initiative is aimed at helping business partners reduce costs and grow revenue when supporting open source technologies. IBM assists partners with free sales, marketing and technical support to use WAS Community Edition to provide departmental and small- and medium-sized customers with an open source foundation for a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that can scale to meet business needs. Based on core open source technology from the Apache Geronimo application server, WAS Community Edition and related subscription support services provide flexible and affordable infrastructure software to organizations that need a reliable alternative to traditional commercial software offerings.
WAS Community Edition, which is free to download and use, pre-integrates Apache Tomcat with several of the most commonly used open source components, such as Web services, security, authentication, messaging and Web tier clustering.
As part of this initiative, Business Partners have access to free, personalized WAS Community Edition technical enablement assistance, IBM Sales Connection, for instant access to WAS Community Edition sales specialists who can help them close deals faster; and lead generation packages.
For additional information and to download WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, visit here.
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